Presidential puppets: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are finished
Restoring the presumption of innocence
For a nation that used to pride itself on hosting festivals of ‘dangerous ideas’, there has certainly been a ridiculous…
A pilot plant for Net Zero
Both solar and wind energy have fatal flaws – solar stops when the sun goes down or if a cloud…
Green feels chop over Labor deals
Last month, 15 timber harvesting operations were suspended by the NSW timber industry controller Forestry Corporation. The Environment Protection Authority…
Trump will change the (energy) world
The film VICE traces the rise of Dick Cheney to the position of US Vice President under the administration of…
Hate speech or censorship? Queensland to give more power to activists
What began as a worthy goal to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace has been hijacked by activists seeking to…
Peter Dutton must take a stand against the eSafety Commission
A new video of a talk by eSafety csar Julie Inman Grant is circulating on social media, revealing what many…
The Coalition must follow Trump’s lead
Wokeism is collapsing. The most putrid ideology to ever inflict liberal democracies is finally crashing. The perpetrators, those silvertails who…
Presidential puppets: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are finished
‘Inevitability’ – it should be the word for the week. It was inevitable that a tech crash would cripple our…
Decolonisation destroys knowledge
In 1945, British author George Orwell said, ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no…
Victoria’s government is rotting away
Putrefaction anywhere is generally unwelcome, but when it occurs in government it’s particularly nauseating. We not only have to bear…
A bone to pick with Biden
Permit me a timely if controversial ‘dog with a bone’ essay, in which I play the dog. Here’s the bone:…
The Trump attack and the death of consensus
Assassination attempts are the boiling point at which politics explodes. They are the final straw, the irascible tension when consensus…
Trajectory towards assassination
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a campaign rally highlights the deadly trajectory of modern political discourse. No longer…
World politics
I tried to lose interest in UK politics but when you have been following events in that country for literally…
France threatens the euro
Emmanuel Macron, on winning the French presidency against Marine Le Pen in 2017, ordered the EU anthem ‘Ode to Joy’…
DEI and the Pink Panthers
‘There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result,’ said Winston Churchill who survived at least…
Taking potshots at Trump
It has become an internet meme to misquote the character Syndrome from the movie The Incredibles: ‘If everything is racist,…
God bless America
Seated on the South Lawn of the White House on 15 September 2020, we couldn’t help but stand as President…
Election interference
Half an inch. Just half an inch. If the bullet had been a centimetre or so to the shooter’s right…
What’s progressive about social decline?
Has conservative thinking been too complacent about important English words being hijacked to obfuscate their meaning? After all, George Orwell…
What the Harehills riots said about Britain
The Harehills disorders, which started last Thursday in Leeds after social services removed five children from a Romani family, is…
Who should Kamala Harris make her running mate?
It’s Kamala. The result of the last 48 hours, capping off one of the most eventful weeks in American political…
Don’t let Ukraine’s culture be erased
Ukraine’s cultural autonomy is again under assault by Russia. Vladimir Putin appears to believe that ‘Ukraine and Ukrainian culture independent…
Macron’s scheming could have disastrous consequences for France
French voters are looking on aghast at the state of their country’s democracy. Faced with stalemate in the French National…
Kiwi life
New Zealand in crisis Given the destruction the previous Labour government inflicted on this country, and the damage caused by…
New Zealand’s carbon sequestration problem
Ongoing concern about climate change has fuelled debate about the part carbon sequestration might play in reducing New Zealand’s net…
Why New Zealand is cracking down on immigration
The government of New Zealand this week tightened the country’s working visa rules in order to stem historically high numbers…
Why is New Zealand’s deputy PM rowing with Chumbawamba?
In their musical heyday, the English anarchist punk band Chumbawamba enjoyed a reputation for having an irreverent attitude towards those…
What Labour could learn from Australia and New Zealand
‘Damned spot’ of blood keeps appearing
People have always fiddled with Shakespeare. Nahum Tate did not give King Lear a happy ending because he was a…
A masterful magnificence
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? culminates the great stretch of American drama that runs from Tennessee Williams’ The…
No hint of vanity
The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…
A tribute to Ismail Kadare, a writer who really deserved a Nobel Prize
Apart from Bob Dylan and Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s a fair bet that most people’s reaction to the Nobel prizewinners for…
A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website
Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs…
‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century.…
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut,…
Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary
The history of princesses and queens has become well-trodden ground in the women’s history genre, particularly the Tudors. Linda Porter’s…
Repenting at leisure: Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler, reviewed
Garlanded with praise from Percival Everett (‘the real deal’), Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties arrives with a fully formed…
Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed
Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile…
The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter
Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States…
An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds
In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple…